Internet access is becoming more and more important across the globe. Access to information, and the ability to exchange information, is an important element of human needs and development. This importance is also reflected in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."
Tor - Anonymity Online
The goal of Tor is to provide a censorsh
ip-resistant & safer access to the Internet. It is the most widely used free & open source anonymization technique in existence. It also makes it possible to host services like websites in a secure and anonymous fashion.
Tor relies on volunteers to share bandwidth and Internet access with other Tor users.
Tor provides the free and open source Tor Browser, a browser specifially made for anonymous and secure web surfing with censorship circumvention built in. At the time of writing, it is being used by more than 500,000 people daily, of which at least 25,000 use "Tor bridges" because their country blocks traditional access to the Tor network. Users include human rights activists, government officials, police investigators, journalists, non-profits and private individuals.
Torservers.net
Torservers.net was started in 2011 in Germany, and quickly became the largest contributor of exit bandwidth for the Tor network. Today, Torservers.net is a collaborative effort by six+ registered non-profits around the globe (see below for a list of organizations). With selected datacenter partners, we professionally operate Tor infrastructure that strengthens the anonymity and speeds up Tor for everyone.
Together, we currently contribute around 10 Gbit/s, a massive amount of traffic: Over 3000 terabytes of user traffic are moved per month.
All of us volunteer to maintain the infrastructure. Your donations will be used in full to pay for traffic and servers.
What we will use your donations for:
- run more Tor servers, maintain current ones, increase its speed!
Usability studies conclude that the most common reason to pick an inferiour and potentially unsafe anti-censorship tool is the slow speed of the Tor network. We believe it is crucial to add both a large number of Tor bridges, and a certain number of fast exit relays, as both bridges and exits currently present the bottleneck of the Tor network.
Bridge Operation: To be able to access the Tor network and thus the free Internet, users in oppressive countries that filter standard Tor access need to learn about special Tor relays as entry points, so called Tor bridges. These are not published as a whole, but distributed in small batches via various means (email, web, social networks, etc). Once the censor learns about the specific bridge, the user needs a new one. Blocked bridges can still be useful in other censoring countries, and so far most countries lifted the block after some period of time (most likely to avoid having too large filter rule tables).
Exit Operation: We will equally coordinate operation of high bandwidth Tor exit relays with a different subset of our partners.
How do we distribute the money?
Each of our partners will get an equal share of the money. Organizations can decide to give parts of their own share to others within the Torservers network. Expenses will be published for public review (hosting bills).
Will the campaign continue after you hit the 1000€ funding goal?
Yes. The campaign will run the full 60 days, and we really hope to collect more than the low barrier of 1000 Euro. To give you an idea, a dedicated Gbit/s server costs at least 400 Euro in Germany, 1000 Euro in Denmark, and 8000 Euro in Asia -- per month. To stengthen the anonymity of Tor users, the servers ideally are distributed all around the globe. Currently, there's a 30 percent chance that a Tor user exits in the USA, and around 25 percent of entering the Tor network via a server in Germany. We aim to change that, and not put more servers into these two jurisdictions.
Torservers.net Organizations
Each of our partners was hand-picked and is trusted. Additional Torservers organizations are currently being formed in the Netherlands and Denmark.
The video was created by Tactical Tech to promote the Tor network. Thanks!
Stickers and posters are sponsored by Stickma. If you have any printing jobs, you should do it via these guys. They are simply awesome.
Perks
Tor Poster
![Run A Tor Relay Poster]()
Official Torproject Stickers
![Ofifical Tor Stickers]()
Alternative Tor Stickers
![Alternative Tor Stickers]()
Tiny Tor Stickers
![Tiny Tor Stickers]()
Tiny Tor Sticker used to cover laptop camera
![Tiny Tor Sticker Covers Laptop Camera]()
torservers.net is not affiliated with the Tor project. "Tor" and the "Onion Logo" are registered trademarks of The Tor Project, Inc.
Questions?
You can find us on IRC, irc.oftc.net in channel #torservers. Or drop us an email at support@torservers.net. You can also contact Moritz on Jabber at moritz /at/ torservers.net.